I have always wished I knew something more about electronics. The wife and I have lived on our Passport 45 Ketch, S/V Katie Lee most of these past 17 years. Hobbies have to be small, an since we are 'subsistence living', inexpensive. Ha!

Sunday, December 1, 2013

My only "almost finished" micro project!
(Quit working on it Nov 2013)

To prove to myself that the wind generator was not a total waste of money, I decided I needed a way to track the electricity it made.

It is a ATMEGA328 with ardunio UNO bootloader copied from the Sparkfun.com "serial LCD backpack" tutorial which I can no longer find on their site. It is connected to the ACS-714 30 amp current sensor I made and posted about a while back.

On the left side, the time rolls over each 24 hours, and resets the total amp hours (Ah=). The right side shows the instantaneous amps (A- discharging-no wind) and the cycles available for more calculation each period (debugging, I said almost finished).

Within 2 weeks of "almost finishing" the bearings went out in the wind generator. I had been seeing less that 20 amp hours per day most days, so I haven't been that excited about climbing the mast a couple times to get it down, repair it and put it back up. And in the mean time I have upped the solar panels to 600 watts, which has taken care of the 120 amp hour/day load we have (before noon most days).

About Me

Larry & Trinda bought their Passport 45 Ketch in 1997. They started sailing westward from Seattle in 2000, pausing briefly in Mexico, the South Pacific, Hawaii, Cooks, Samoa, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Marshals, Micronesia, Palau and Philippines in 2011. Then on to Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines again and Taiwan in 2017